Hi folks, just two topics for this week, governance and BTC Lightning:
DeFi Governance weekly:
Celo holders voted to approve the inclusion of carbon credits in its reserve, probably the first for a crypto protocol. Generally, I think the inclusion of some carbon credits is interesting. However, crypto tokens representing carbon credits tend to have price movements that are closer to the broader crypto market than to carbon credits, which I see as a problem.
An uncensored Uniswap user interface is emerging as certain tokens have been removed from the app.uniswap.org website partly for regulatory reasons. This is a good example of how a protocol, such as Uniswap, often has fully decentralised components (the smart contracts) as well as centralised and often regulated components (a website owned by a US company, Uniswap labs).
Anyone with a Helium.com hotspot should know that rewards have been halved as of August 1st. Still, many hotspots are still earning a return on investment within a few months.
You can dig deeper on the above three points in the full post here.
BTC Lightning
My BTC lightning node is now live, with 6 active channels. If you have a node yourself and want to connect, you can find the public info on my node here.
A few initial learnings:
Getting started. I’ll be doing up a guide over the next month, but if you want to get a head start, you can get set up following guidance on www.getumbrel.com .
Costs of getting set up. It costs about $150 to buy the equipment. You then need to lock up about 0.1 BTC to have ten decent channels (a decent channel has about 1M satoshis = 0.01 BTC on each side). This is about $3.5k today. Not trivial. Of course, if you already own Bitcoin, you can move that in.
Earnings. Transaction fees earned seem to be about 0.1% of transactions, on average. Of course, the return you get on capital depends on the utilisation of your channels (which is hard to optimise). I’ve no idea what return on capital I’ll be able to get but my guess is that I’ll probably do well to break even (when considering the cost of setting up and managing channels).
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